On words we shouldn’t use anymore

Not having written in a while, I figured it’d be neat to ease myself back into this hobby by writing about something that I found of interest… this article…

Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

But I don’t really wanna talk about the article’s contents in question but much rather would like to write about the quote there. Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. Woof. Why?

>> This is a post about language use and using different words that mean the same thing to appease those around you who are bothered by your words. With love <3

So, as for me, I’ve got family and friends who suffer from and struggle with tumours and cancer, and so, seeing people describing things, phenomenons and other human beings as “cancers” or “tumours” is pretty gutting. Like, genuinely, I have a lot of feelings on this topic but I also get that it’s just an expression and whatnot, and that there is no ill will in it… towards people with cancer/tumours or their family/friends/etc, at least.

I find it dehumanizing, honestly, and I guess that’s the whole point. It’s a pretty obvious thing that calling something or someone “an evil that is hard to contain/eradicate” is very obviously meant to dehumanize the person or to really talk badly about a specific thing.

I also cannot really reasonably explain why I personally find it so bad. There are certainly worse things you can say, after all.

So, instead, let’s talk about cool words that you could use alternatively!

In the case of cancer…

The core aspect of it is that you really wanna remove it. It’s like those pesky memories of your childhood traumata. You don’t want to be around but whenever you least expect it, something reminds you of them. Just get rid of them! They’re a real blight for me. A scourge, you could say.

See? Those words sound really cool and powerful, just like cancer, and they mean the same thing when applied to something or someone.

• Elmo is a festering rot that plagues society.
• WP Engine is a corruption that is bound to destroy WordPress.
• Racism and sexism are contagious diseases that have no place in the gaming community.

All of these statements sound incredibly extreme in a very edgy way… just like “cancer”… but people don’t have the same connotations with those terms.

“Derp(y)”

Perhaps, you’ve come across the term “derp”. Yeah… while it was popularized in the 2010s meme culture, it used to be and is often still used to describe neurodivergent folks. Those classrooms with neurodivergent people in it? Well, folks would call it the “derp class”.

So, I don’t use that word. I do understand that people don’t mean harm by it but I just personally don’t like it and I have negative connotations with it.

May I offer you an alternative in the form of: Goofy. Goof. Goofball. If it needs to go in a different, more insulting, direction, perhaps “airhead(ed)”, “fool(ish)”, etc. can work just as well, and they all add some character to your speech. Heck, Gen Alpha folks might not understand what “derp” means anyway, so perhaps you gotta mix it up a lil to really sell to them that you’re older than them.

Black/White…etc

On another note, “blacklisting/whitelisting” has literally no reason as to why it’s black/white coded. I’ve heard from friends who are in IT that a lot of places have switched over from that onto “blocklisting” and “allowlisting”. It’s a tiny change but it makes a big difference. In one of the words, it’s literally just a vowel that changes. Yay.

I’m not sure where the black==evil & white==good symbolism stems from, of course, and it doesn’t have to be racism… but it certainly aids racist ideologies if you spoonfeed people that symbolism over and over and over again through all forms of media. One guess of mine would be that it stems from the primordial fear of the dark/night, and light being the opposite of this, but that’s just a theory… a language theory… I need to stop.

Ultimately, in programming, blacklist and whitelist can be confusing. Similarly, though, white is seen as something to permit/allow/encourage whereas black is seen something that needs to be denied and discouraged… the signalling is there. Hence people stopped using it. It’s the same with the “slave” and “master” terminology that was also used in Python. When I learned Python, I was still taught that that was normal but I graduated in 2018 and didn’t care about IT anymore, so I ended up not hearing about the devs of Python stopping the use of those terms back then already.

Anyway, here’s a cool article from VICE on this topic.

There are also other terms that use the black/white symbolism to connotate blackness to evil and wrongdoing.

Personally, I don’t like the “black and white thinking” expression and hence use “binary thinking” instead, as in Ones (1s) and Zeros (0s), because it means the same but also provides more connotations for the listeners because it establishes that thinking like that is something that isn’t human. Eh?

Something along those lines.

What I mean to say is that nuance is important and binary thinking is bad and I feel like “binary” shows that non-human character of a lack of nuance better.

But there are also terms like “black sheep” which essentially stems from actual black sheep whose wool wasn’t worth as much or whose wool would need to get died and whatnot to be profitable. In that case, it’s not based in racism but I think using “outlier” or “exception” depending on the context instead sounds a bit better.

And then there’s “crazy”/”insane”

When something truly bizarre or wild happens, people often use the term “crazy” to describe that thing. The term, however, perpetuates mental health stigma. It draws on stereotypes and that in turn can make it more difficult for people to seek help when they suffer from mental health problems. By the way, here are some good resources.

Aside from that, though, “crazy” also could be a sexist term or could reinforce sexist stereotypes when used to describe women, especially due to “stereotypes about women being irrational, hysterical or disconnected from reality – all meanings that are associated with the word crazy“, as explained by Brenda Curtis, PhD, MsPH, an assistant professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Penn Medicine.

So, instead, perhaps we should go back to using…

• bizarre
• absurd
• foolish
• wild
• unreal
• strange
• preposterous
• unbelievable
• odd
• weird
• and more

I think the way it’s used nowadays most of the time, “wild” is probably the best alternative for “crazy”. In fact, here in Germany, a lot of youths say “wild” but as an anglicism to describe unbelievable or absurd situations.

But…

Language evolves naturally and we cannot force a change. That said, we can definitely influence and educate our environments, as long as we keep it friendly and don’t attack others for it. By educating ourselves, we can improve, and perhaps our use of synonyms for potentially harmful words makes a bit of a difference in the form of others (especially those marginalized) taking notice and feeling more comfortable around us… or in the form of people slowly adapting these alternatives into their own repertoire of words.

I don’t think that we should force a change by any means… but we should definitely make changes happen once we do learn of potentially harmful elements in our language use.

All that said, I’m just one dude over here. English isn’t even my first or second language, so I’d love to hear some thoughts on this from other people. What do you think? What are some other words you’d like to read/hear less of due to certain connotations? Let me know!

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.